


In Motion

by azephirin



Series: Intriguing Possibilities [2]
Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Bondage, Developing Relationship, Exhibitionism, F/M, Future Fic, Long-Distance Relationship, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Singapore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-08
Updated: 2011-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:24:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>We will find a way or we will make one.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Motion

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel (mostly) to the other stories in the [Intriguing Possibilities](http://archiveofourown.org/series/6301) 'verse and will probably make more sense if you've read at least one of them first (they're all short!).
> 
> To the extent that any of these characters are real people, this story depicts them as they are fictitiously portrayed in Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's ~~RPF 'verse~~ movie _The Social Network_.
> 
> The title is from one of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack compositions; the summary is a quotation attributed to the Carthaginian military commander Hannibal (Latin: _Inveniemus viam aut faciemus_ )

We’d been officially dating for about six weeks—to that extent that two people can date when they live 8500 miles from each other—when I visited Eduardo in Singapore for the first time. It was officially a business trip, and Third Place’s accountants would deduct it from our tax liability as one—I had a hotel room booked, I had some potential investors and developers to meet.

Really I was visiting Eduardo.

He lived in this absurd apartment in what must have been, if not the tallest building in the city, then certainly one of the close runners-up. It was the kind of building that had swimming pools, plural, that looked like resorts, and real art, the kind from Sotheby’s, in the lobby. It occurred to me now and then that I could afford a place like this if I wanted it. But I loved my apartment in Hayes Valley, and every time I thought about buying a house, it seemed like too much work, no matter how domestically blissful Gina and Neila were in Tiburon. I’d upsized to a three-bedroom so that I could have a guest room and an office, but it didn’t look like something out of _Sunset_ magazine the way Gina and Neila’s bayside architectural gem did, or like something out of _Conde Nast Traveler_ the way Eduardo’s place did. It just kind of looked like my apartment.

The early stages of a relationship are ebullient but tricky, as you begin to learn the ways that you and this shiny new person may fit together as well as the ways that this person becomes less shiny and may actually drive you a little nuts sometimes. It’s even harder long-distance: It’s probably one thing to wrangle being apart for long periods of time when you’re a little more established in coupledom and you know each other better, but Eduardo and I had only just started seeing each other. We’d been friends first, but not for that long, and also long-distance, so it didn’t help me get a handle on things like whether he farted in bed (though all indications from the weekends we’d spent together pointed to no, thank God), whether he left bristles all over the sink when he shaved (also no, but I’d yet to see him in his natural habitat), and whether I had any similar infelicities that so far he either hadn’t noticed or had been too polite to point out.

The last time we’d seen each other had been a month ago, in London, roughly equidistant between our two cities (twelve hours in the air for Eduardo, eleven for me). We’d stayed at the Dorchester, in a suite that was quite lovely—good thing, because we’d left all of once, going for a walk in Hyde Park that we’d ended up abbreviating rather than risking public indecency because apparently some part of both of us was still about seventeen years old. We’d spent nearly all of the time in bed—and in the shower, and on the floor, and once in the window (it was a rooftop suite, and so too high for anyone to actually see us, placating my heretofore latent puritanical side).

The time before that had been when he’d visited me in San Francisco and picked an absolutely inexplicable fight with me on a Saturday morning, then shouted at me that he loved me as though it was somehow my fault.

Come to think of it, maybe I was starting to get a handle on Eduardo’s less-than-shiny qualities. I just wasn’t sure how much he’d picked up on mine.

His apartment was enormous, way more space than one person needed—you could have held ballroom-dance classes in the living room. Picture windows on one side looked out over the city and, at a smaller distance, the tower that was this building’s twin; the windows on the other side, though, let you gaze out at the harbor and the ocean. It was pretty amazing.

I pressed my hands to the glass. “That is the motherfucking South China Sea,” I breathed, mostly to myself.

Eduardo came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders and waist. “The Singapore Strait, actually. The South China Sea is to the east.”

“Know-it-all,” I said grumpily, and Eduardo laughed. “You’ll have to take me to see it, then. Especially since I’ve decided that we aren’t spending the whole time in bed this visit.”

“We aren’t?

I turned around and poked him in the chest. “No. We are going to do things that—that people do. That grown-ups do. Like…”

“Have sex?”

I poked him again. “Like go to restaurants and the theater and to see the South China Sea. And I have meetings, and you probably do too.”

“At least fifty-one percent of the time has to be in bed. A controlling share.”

I tried to glare at him, but it was impossible. “Mr. Saverin,” I said, “you have a deal.”

He pushed me back up against the window, and I was unbuckling his belt before I even realized what I was doing. He slid his hands under my thighs, and we were about three minutes away from fucking in the picture window in the middle of the day in plain sight of everybody in the next building as well as, for that matter, most of the Port of Singapore. My puritanical side said, “Close the curtains.”

He did, and we fucked on one of the huge, soft couches, tangled up in each other with most of our clothes still on. I’d made a trip to Agent Provocateur for the occasion, but I’m not sure Eduardo, usually the fashionista of the two of us, even noticed the lacy lavender briefs—they didn’t survive his hands as he ripped them down to put his mouth on me, and any protest I might have made died when his mouth met my clit.

Fucking half-dressed on the couch with somebody’s torn panties on the floor isn’t exactly the most grown-up thing to do, but I was OK with it.

As we panted together afterwards, slick and sweaty, he kissed my throat and I untucked his oxford shirt the rest of the way so that I could touch his bare warm skin.

“I think I broke your underwear,” Eduardo said after a moment.

“You can buy me another pair.” After three orgasms, I was feeling magnanimous, not to mention a little hoarse from screaming.

“Excellent,” he said.

“I’ll model them for you.”

“Even better.”

We were going to have to get up soon, because there was going to be a massive wet spot and this was an expensive couch, but for the moment it felt too good to lie like this, warm and close and together for the first time in way too long.

“Also,” Eduardo added, “you’re not staying at that hotel. FYI.”

“Hell no,” I said, and put off the knowledge that we needed to move for a little while longer.

+||+||+

Here’s the first thing I learned on that trip:

I didn’t know Portuguese, but I could tell when Eduardo was talking to Cecília, even if I walked into the room in the middle of the conversation and had no other context clues: his tone was informal, sometimes teasing, always affectionate even when he was serious. And I could usually tell when he was talking to his other relatives, his grandparents and aunts and uncles: more formal, but still affectionate. I knew that he and his parents were no longer officially estranged, and hadn’t been for a while, but I’d heard Eduardo speak to most of his extended family yet never to them.

And then I woke up my first morning in Singapore and padded out to find Eduardo talking on the phone on the balcony, one arm crossed tightly over his chest. At my angle, I could see that his eyes were closed, and I wondered whether he was pretending to be somewhere else or nowhere at all.

I made myself some toast and tea, ate and drank it, and then decided that it was time to go outside.

He turned when the sliding-glass door opened, and I heard the end of a sentence that was not in English. He said something else, then hung up. He stared at his cell phone for a moment, fingers clenched around it, and I said, “Don’t throw that off the balcony. You could kill somebody.”

“I was just telling myself that.”

He set the phone down and leaned against the railing, and I leaned beside him. “You OK?”

“Just my parents. My mom—it’s not like my dad actually wants to talk to me. He just doesn’t want to have to explain to the rest of the family why we might officially not be on speaking terms. Even though they already know and think he’s a jackass for it.” He paused and said, “You know how your parents can make you feel like you’re about twelve years old?”

“My mom, all the time. But not…not like your parents do, Eduardo.”

“Your mom’s an NYPD homicide detective, though. I think that makes just about everyone twelve years old by comparison.”

“Yeah, it’s hard knowing that your mom is and will always be more badass than you.”

He laughed, but then sobered and said, “Sorry. I didn’t expect her to call. I didn’t— I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

“I lived through Gina’s weekly long-distance screaming fights with her mother in college,” I said. “I want to punch your parents in the face, but that’s nothing new.”

Eduardo said something under his breath that might have been agreement.

“I didn’t know Gina and her mom don’t get along. Is it because she’s a lesbian?”

“Strangely, no, despite the fact that her mom goes to seven a.m. Mass every single day. They’re just a lot alike and shouters by nature.” I put my arm through his and we stood there for a few moments and looked at the harbor. “Have you eaten yet?” I asked.

“No. She called right as I got out of the shower.”

“So let’s feed you, and then you can take me to see the South China Sea.”

“I’m not really—”

“Hungry, I know, but you’re eating anyway because you’ll just feel more miserable if you don’t. I’ll make you some toast.”

Eduardo ate his toast, and then we went and saw the sea. We wound up in Malaysia, because that’s how the geography works, but it turned out to be less than three hours away. It’s not every day that you go for a drive and end up in Malaysia, at least not if you’re me. The water was beautiful, blue-green like an infinite jewel.

+||+||+

I had a series of meetings with potential investors the next day, promising but preliminary: if they were productive, I’d set up a conference and involve James, the CFO, but for the moment everyone was mostly just having lunch and tossing exploratory lobs at everyone else. In the end, it was a pleasant introduction to the Singaporean style of business and negotiation, and it did look as though I’d be involving James, so all told it had been a useful afternoon. We discussed reconvening, perhaps in Tokyo or Paris, and agreed to have our assistants look into it. It was late in the afternoon when I finally went back to Eduardo’s, and I walked—it wasn’t far, and I watched the sun sparkling off the water and enjoyed its heat on my skin.

Eduardo was there when I got in, dressed in crisp suit pants and one of his usual immaculate oxfords, though with the sleeves rolled up. I wanted to go across the room and take it off him, but he was on the phone and I thought that might be rude.

He was also, I realized, drawing on the picture window with what looked like a Sharpie. I put down my things and went over to investigate, and saw that he was mostly writing, though he’d drawn some rough diagrams, and it looked like the outline of a business model. It also took up most of the windowpane, and the windowpane was not small. He kept talking, kissed my cheek, then rubbed a portion away with his finger and wrote in something else—a dry-erase marker, then, rather than a Sharpie.

By the time I’d gotten myself something to drink and changed into jeans, the conversation had ended, and I came back out into the living room to see Eduardo taking a series of pictures of the notations on the window. Then he took a cloth and wiped them all away.

“Hey,” he said, and came over to kiss me properly. “How was your day?”

“Fine, the investors are probably in, we’re meeting again, I haven’t seen you naked in eight hours and that’s way too long. How was yours? Why were you writing on the window?”

“It was fine, and—” He shrugged, looking mildly self-conscious. “I don’t know. I just think better that way. It’s like a huge sheet of paper that you can write on over and over again without having to throw it away, and I like being able to see outside while I’m working. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”

“You were a wall-drawer, huh?”

“Just windows. It drove our housekeeper crazy, though. I now have the dubious talent of knowing how to clean just about every substance in existence off glass, so that she wouldn't have to do it."

"Oh my God, I bet you were the most adorable little kid. All serious and intent with your big eyes and your crazy hair and your math problems on the windows.”

“More like the most awkward little kid. I looked like an anime character.”

I ran a thumb over his eyebrow. “Like Bambi.”

“Dustin used to call me that when he was drunk,” Eduardo admitted.

“That’s terrible!” I said, but I couldn’t help giggling.

“But apparently true.”

“You’re a very manly Bambi,” I said.

Eduardo snorted. “Well, he was a guy—a male deer—wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” I said— _Bambi_ didn’t have a space in my sister’s collection of Disney movies for my niece, so I hadn’t seen it since whenever we might have watched it ourselves as kids. “But he can be male if you want him to be.”

I pushed Eduardo up against the island that divided the room from the kitchen and started unbuttoning his shirt. It was like unwrapping a gift, this man in his perfect clothes, waiting for me to discover what was underneath. He slid his hands underneath my T-shirt—my lack of a bra was my own gift to him—and started teasing my nipples with his fingertips. I shuddered, feeling him getting hard against me, and it was exquisite.

Then he pulled away and said, “I thought we were doing grown-up things this trip.”

“Sex is for grown-ups,” I retorted, and tried to pull him back to me.

“But what about dinner? And the theater?” Those doe eyes were wide, brown, and innocent. “You know, the things you said you wanted to do.”

“You are such a bastard,” I said. I rubbed the heel of my hand against the outline of his cock, and smiled when he bit his lip and choked back a gasp. I kept stroking him through the fabric, and his hips moved with me as he got harder, lengthening into my palm. “We’ve both been in business meetings almost all fucking day,” I went on. “And you’re the one who mandated fifty-one percent of the time in bed—”

“The shower this morning— Orlain, _please_ —”

“I can’t believe you’re arguing with one breath and begging me with another. No, wait, I actually can. And the shower isn’t bed, so it doesn’t count as part of the fifty-one percent according to the terms of our deal, and I swear to God that if you’re not fucking me within the next ten minutes, I’m going to kill you.”

He undid my jeans, and I moaned at the first clever touch to my clit. “No wonder you’re a CEO,” he murmured, biting his way down my throat. “Negotiating—no, dictating—terms gets you wet.”

“I’m wet”—I had to stop for a second because he was making little circles, just the way I liked, and I momentarily forgot my next part of speech—“because”—right, subordinating conjunction—“you’re making me wet. _Fuck!_ Asshole.”

Eduardo’s other hand tightened on my ass. “That’s fucking right I’m making you wet,” he growled, and I shivered happily. “I’ve been hard all day thinking about you—after you left, but before I went out, I had to go in the bathroom and jerk off, so I wouldn’t be hard when I went downtown. All fucking day, all I could think about was my fingers on your clit, your mouth on my cock—”

“You want that?” I interrupted him. “You want me to suck you?”

“Do it right here.”

“Not with the curtains open.” It was early evening, not quite dinner time, and still light outside and in.

“We’re on the sixtieth floor,” he said. “Nobody’s going to see.”

“The entire side of your apartment is windows. Somebody could fly by in a traffic helicopter.” I didn’t actually know whether they had traffic helicopters in Singapore, but it was the principle of the thing.

“In the bedroom, then,” he said.

I was, though mildly disheveled, still fully dressed, and I stayed that way as I told Eduardo to take off his clothes. He was always so careful, putting his shirt and undershirt in the laundry, hanging up his pants neatly creased. He stretched out on the bed, and I took a moment to look at the strong, lean lines of his body: the odd delicacy of his collarbones, his narrow but solid shoulders, his finely boned wrists and long-fingered hands, the shallow hollows of his hips. He smiled at me, as though aware that I was looking, as though content to be on display, and I smiled back, running a finger down his torso and watching him arch into the touch. Funny, that somebody who maintained such public reserve, shielded by his perfect manners and his fastidious dress, would be so happy to be bared in private—but, then, perhaps it was not so surprising after all. I wondered how many other people had seen Eduardo like this—I wondered whether Christy or Will had, or Mark, and I wondered whether, if so, any of them had realized what a gift Eduardo had given them.

I covered his body with mine, fitting my hips over his and kissing him. “Put your hands above your head,” I said. If we’d been at my apartment I would have told him to wrap his fingers around the headboard slats, but his was solid, so I made so.

He did, without protest, with another smile, and I kissed him again, stroking his cheekbones and his hair. “Good,” I whispered, “that was very good,” and he shivered. “Next time,” I went on, “maybe I’ll tie them. Maybe to the headboard, next time we’re at my place, or behind your back—”

“Now,” he interrupted me. “I want it now.”

“Really?” I blurted out. I hadn’t anticipated that. I’d thought he’d like the idea, but I’d expected that it would something we thought about (with optional other activities) for a while before we actually gave it a try.

“Right-hand closet, far right side,” Eduardo said.

I didn’t mean to, but I stared. “Seriously?”

“Yes!” he said, staring back at me with what looked like some frustration. “I mean, unless you don’t want to. But if you do—”

Slender though Eduardo’s wrists were, he was still a man, and a relatively tall one, so my fingers wouldn’t go all the way around them. But he moaned when I pressed them to the mattress. I kissed one, right above the vein that led from his hand, and said, “Stay there.”

I tried to keep my expression even as I tried to imagine what sort of hidden bondage gear towards which Eduardo had directed me. Would there be elegant chains made of pearls or semiprecious (or even precious; he was a billionaire, after all) stones? Lace blindfolds? Gold handcuffs? Satin rope?

I bit back a laugh when I opened the closet door, looked to the right, and saw that he’d led me to his ties—the kind that men wear around their necks and down their chests to break the color monotony of business suits. Eduardo had, as I might have imagined, a lot of them, and I reached past the patterns (mostly conservative, stripes and the occasional subtle paisley) for a solid-colored one in a pretty, oceanic blue. The silk was as soft on my fingertips, like something that should be worn on bare skin rather than outside a shirtfront. The unobtrusive label read Hermès. As if I would have expected less. I wrapped it around my palm and went back over to the bed.

“This will do for now,” I said, “because God forbid we tie you up with anything but this season’s couture. But when I get home, I’ll find something a little more appropriate.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to go shopping. Something pretty, because you're a snob.” He opened his mouth to object, and I said, “Eduardo, half your clothes are custom-made and the other half are runway designers. You went to Harvard and you live in the tallest building in Singapore. I would feel a little déclassé using the tie from my bathrobe.”

He did laugh at that, but his eyes were gleaming as he said, “That would be OK.”

“Maybe,” I responded, “but I want to buy you something pretty.”

He didn’t answer verbally, but he crossed one wrist over the other and looked at me invitingly.

I kissed him, and tied them together.

He gasped and twisted as I licked him; he spread his legs and I settled between them. I used my tongue on the head and light touches on his balls, and I held his hips down when he whimpered and tried to thrust upward. I soon sent one hand back to exploring, though, rubbing his perineum, tracing back towards his ass. He’d had enough sex with men that I was pretty sure he wouldn’t freak out if I started playing with him there, but I didn’t want to interrupt myself to find lube, and Eduardo was obviously not currently capable of hunting through the bedside table for it. I’d discovered in London that he was delightfully noisy when I blew him; I took him all the way into my mouth, and he cried out, writhing as though on a knifepoint between pleasure and pain.

I let him go and stood up, and he whispered, “No.” His eyes were closed. I could see the indention of teeth where he’d bitten his lip.

“Open your eyes, baby,” I said, gently, and he did.

He watched me avidly as I took off my clothes: shirt, then bra, jeans, underwear. We spent a few moments just checking each other out, and it occurred to me that the discovery was maybe the most fun part of a new relationship, looking at this person you want so much and are, unbelievably, allowed to touch. Eduardo was still desperately hard, but apart from that he looked completely at ease, his bound arms relaxed, his eyes greedy but affectionate as they met mine.

I could feel his gaze follow me as I went over to the nightstand and got out what we needed. He sighed happily as I slicked the condom over his cock, and we both made surprised, vulnerable little sounds as I slid down on top of him.

I bent forward and pressed down on his wrists again, let the ends of my hair trail over his skin. He pushed deeper into me and I pushed back, and the angle was good like this. I rode him until he was shuddering inside me, until even through the latex I could feel the hot urgency of his orgasm. I was so close that I barely had the motor skills to undo the knots, but when I did, he shoved me onto my back and guided my legs over his shoulders, and I’m pretty sure I shouted his name when the blinding haze of climax hit me.

When my brain came back online, Eduardo was sprawled out beside me, hand resting on my stomach. It wasn’t my favorite part of my body—too poochy, always, and I still had stretch marks from the sudden appearance of my hips and breasts in my early teens—but he seemed to like it, settling his hands there when he was lying next to me or behind me.

“Let’s do that again,” he said.

“Right now?”

“I wish.” He kissed my shoulder and yawned. I wasn’t insulted; I was sleepy from all that, too. “Let’s take a nap and then shower and go have dinner like grown-ups, and then we can do that again.”

“Deal,” I said, and dozed off like a cat in a patch of sunlight.

+||+||+

I didn’t have any meetings the next day, but I did need to check in at work, and Eduardo spent several hours on conference calls. He worked from the living room, so I took over one of the guest rooms. (Why he had such an enormous apartment when he was just one person, and one person who travelled a great deal, was beyond me; maybe, simply, because he could.)

We were in the early stages of hiring a new director of marketing, and James and Bev, the COO, were pushing for the addition of a general-counsel position. I’d resisted it—we had an excellent and responsive IP firm on retainer—but I was, reluctantly, starting to agree that we were at a size where we needed somebody full-time. Facebook had added the position in response to privacy concerns; we hadn’t had those same issues (smaller user base, and, if I was feeling frank and self-confident, better planning and a different ethic), but I was starting to come around to the idea that it might be a good idea to have a full-time legal department to help prevent them rather than for us to hastily try to patch things up after they occurred.

I asked Bev to send me the financials to look over—we’d need to budget a substantial salary for this person, and at least one paralegal too, and then there were the expenses of the search itself—but my mind was more or less made up.

Gina had sent me the finalized code for an update to the community rooms, one of Third Place’s most used features; I looked it over, made some changes, and then sent it back. I wanted to call her, because I could always count on Gina for the unexpurgated version of what was going on at the office while I was away (Bev would, of course, fill me in on what I needed to know, but she wouldn’t tell me which interns got caught having sex on the copier and who referred to their partner’s penis as “my little radish” over work email). Plus we hadn’t talked since I’d left for this trip, and I missed her—unless one or both of us had some kind of work-related commitment, we almost always had lunch together, and we were in each other’s offices multiple times a day as well as seeing each other outside of work. I wanted to tell her about the South China Sea, and that I’d caved on the general-counsel thing, and about what Eduardo sounded like when he talked to his parents, and how strange it was to be able to fly into another hemisphere for what was, in many ways, a glorified booty call. (That wasn’t entirely fair—I would have wanted to see Eduardo even without the admittedly excellent benefit of the sex. But it was still strange to be able to do it, and on short notice, and just because I wanted to.) But midafternoon Singapore time was late at night California time, and if Gina and Neila weren’t in bed by now, they would be soon. It was even later New York time, so I couldn’t call my parents or my sister; Chicago, where my friend Carol lived, was no better.

It was, suddenly, a strangely lonely feeling, here halfway across the world from nearly everyone I knew. If I got up and went into the living room, Eduardo would probably be engrossed in a conversation and, in all likelihood, outlining something on the window. (Maybe, I thought, the apartment’s size had nothing to do with why he’d taken it—maybe it had been the expansive line of windows waiting for his ideas to pour out on them. I would have to ask him.) When I left, I would miss him terribly, but I would also be happy to be back in my own apartment, in my own bed.

 _A fish may love a bird—or a Californian a Singaporean—but where would they live?_ asked a part of my mind that I promptly told to be quiet. But it was something I’d need to think over later, the fact that 8500 miles is a daunting distance even when you and your lover have all the resources in the world to make it as small as possible.

There was really only one thing for it when I got like this: I reopened the code Gina had sent me. This was her job now more than mine, but our design had always been collaborative, and delving into the makeup and architecture settled my mind into structures, layouts, lines of code. Building, creating. (Gina would probably kill me the next morning when she saw all my further changes, but it was a back-and-forth that we were used to after all these years.)

I was deeply enough into it that, several hours later, Eduardo had to physically shake me to remind me that we were due out with several of his Singapore friends. “You’re wired in,” he said with a half-smile that I couldn’t quite interpret.

I stretched—I hadn’t realized how stiff my back had gotten. “Let me write this line and email it to Gina, and I’ll be done. Did you just finish up?”

“My last call ended a while ago; I’ve just been doing research and catching up on some email. You looked like you were in the middle of it, though—I didn’t want to distract you.”

I thought of my mood before I’d engrossed myself in the code. “No, you should have. Gina’s probably never going to speak to me again because of all these changes anyway. Where are we going?”

It turned out to be a dressy place, which was actually good, because it gave me an excuse to wear the Herve Leger dress I’d bought and hadn’t had an occasion for. (Something else strange but nice: being able to buy Herve Leger dresses, and without even needing something to wear them to.) It was a fairly basic sleeveless sheath style, but I liked its dark magenta color, and I’d gotten a pair of sexy lace-patterned stiletto sandals to go with it. The expression on Eduardo’s face as I was putting them on suggested that maybe we didn’t need to go out after all; I laughed and said, “I don’t want your friends’ first impression of me to be that I stood them up.”

The friends were a group of six, mostly other businesspeople but interspersed with a playwright and a graduate student in architecture at the National University. We started out with drinks, then moved to dinner at one of those restaurants with five tables that doesn’t give you a menu but instead informs you of what you will be eating by way of a multicourse meal based on whatever mood the chef was in that morning. I had no complaints, though—the food was excellent and the company good, and the playwright and I got into a good-natured argument over Neil Simon (phenomenal, or phenomenally overrated?).

It was late-ish when we got back. Eduardo had left the curtains open, and the panorama as we walked into the apartment was spectacular, the lights of the city glittering against the dark mystery of the water. I went to stand by the windows as I had the day I’d arrived; the panorama was different at night, though, enigmatic and elegant rather than busy and bright.

Eduardo closed and locked the door, but he didn’t turn on the interior lights. Like on the first day, he came and stood behind me, arms around me, chin on my shoulder. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, and leaned back against him. We’d had enough wine that I wasn’t drunk, exactly, but my blood and skin were warm with it, and Eduardo felt good, slender but deceptively strong, against me. “You didn’t get this place for the view, though. It’s too big for you, but a smaller apartment wouldn’t have a living room this size and so it wouldn't have windows like that.”

“None of them did,” he said, kissing the tendon where my shoulder met my neck.

I hadn’t known him long, and we lived halfway across the world from each other, and he held part ownership in my competitor, and it was really stupid to love someone under those circumstances. But he’d chosen his apartment because he could draw on the windows, and I did.

I kept watching the night city, and sighed happily as Eduardo pushed my dreads aside to press his lips to the nape of my neck. It was awkward to reach behind myself, but I did with one arm, to card my fingers through his hair. I could feel the warmth of his hands through the dress. It was cut on contours, meant to be worn without a bra, and so there was only the thin layer of satin between my nipples and his fingertips. He spent some time rubbing them, exquisitely gently, and he didn’t stop kissing me—neck, shoulders, the small portion left exposed by the high back of the dress—as he did. I closed my other hand in the fabric of his suit pants and pressed back against him; he was getting hard.

I wanted his touch on my skin, and I reached behind myself again, this time to unzip the dress a few inches. He kissed the newly bared parts of my back, and I shivered. I wriggled my shoulders, hoping he’d get the hint, and he unzipped the dress a few more inches, enough for me to shrug free of the top of it.

He covered my breasts with his palms, meanwhile outlining the shell of my ear with his tongue, sucking lightly on my earlobe, and I wanted to tell him telepathically to undo the dress the rest of the way, to touch me where I knew I was wet and eager for him—

And then, through the haze of arousal and wine, I remembered where we were in the apartment.

“Eduardo, the curtains—”

“Please,” he whispered, and between London and my first day in Singapore and now, I was definitely dealing with someone with an exhibitionism kink. That reserve, shaking itself away like an animal shaking away water.

“I think I know another reason you got these windows,” I said, but I was breathless enough that it didn’t sound like much of a criticism.

“I was single when I got this place,” he reminded me, but that didn’t mean anything: I’d been single, too, when I’d picked out my bed, but I’d selected the Mission-style frame, with its simple, symmetrical woodwork, for reasons other than the purely aesthetic. Eduardo’s hands were making their way downward, over my belly and hips, and I admit it, I shifted my legs apart just a little, inviting him where I wanted him. “We’re on the sixtieth floor,” he reminded me. “And it’s midnight. No traffic helicopters.” I could hear the smile in his voice, even though I knew he was as worked up as I was.

The logical rebuttal was that if nobody could see, what was the point? But this wasn’t about logic.

“Somebody could still see right in,” I said.

“The apartment’s dark. It’s probably lighter outside than it is in here.” He trailed light fingers over my pubis, and right as I pushed up to meet them, he moved them away.

“You enormous asshole,” I said, and Eduardo laughed.

He started stroking me, lightly, enough that I could just feel it through the dress and the thong I was wearing underneath. (This was the type of dress with which you wore underwear that was tantamount to feats of engineering, a thong, or nothing at all.) “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he said, low. “And I’m telling you, again, that nobody can see us, but if they could, every man in Singapore—and probably a lot of the women too—would want to be where I am now. Up here with you wet and not naked enough—”

“I was trying to tell you to unzip my dress the rest of the way.”

“I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that,” Eduardo said.

“It was telepathic,” I told him.

He bit my shoulder, not enough to bruise, just enough for a little bit of sting, and said, “Can I? Or do you want to go back to the bedroom?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then, realizing that hadn’t been entirely clear, I added, “You can.”

He did, and the dress fell down around my feet in a glossy puddle. He breathed out something in what I assumed was Portuguese, and his fingers finally, finally made their way beneath the thong, and I moaned when they met my clit. It was the exact opposite of the night before, when I’d had all my clothes on and Eduardo had been naked and inviting on the bed. He pushed the thong down and I stepped out of it. The shoes had a side zip, so I decided to leave them on; I doubted that Eduardo was going to object.

My knees were going liquid as he rubbed me in tight circles, and I was biting my lip to keep from whimpering. I managed, “Faster”—but instead Eduardo turned me around and dropped down in front of me.

I was naked against the glass, and he was kneeling in front of me fully dressed, down to the buttons on his shirt and even his shoes. He was using both hands, not to hold me up, but to take me apart, spreading me with one as his tongue drove at my clit, fucking me with the other. It was a good thing the window was there, because I wouldn’t have been able to stand otherwise. I screamed when I came, my fingers clenched in his hair, pressing his face against my cunt.

His hands were shaking when he stood up, and it took both of us to undo the buttons of his shirt so that I could throw it on the floor. Getting him naked was more than we could coordinate at the moment: it was enough to unfasten his belt and get his pants and boxer-briefs down. He had a condom in his pocket, which meant that he’d planned something like this, which I was totally going to harass him about later, but right now it just meant that we didn’t have to stop and find on. I opened it and rolled it onto him, teasing the head and shaft of his cock as I did, and this time I let him slide his hands under my thighs, lift me up, and kiss my mouth as he entered me.

I wrapped an arm around his shoulders and both legs around his hips. I was still high from the first orgasm, and I reached between our bodies to touch myself. It wasn’t going to take much—I was already mostly there; this was just a light push over the edge. Eduardo’s eyes flew open when he realized what I was doing, and he bit out, “Sometime— _fuck_ —sometime I want to watch you do that.”

“I want you to. God! And I want to watch you too.”

“You can.” He kissed me again, hard, tangling his fingers in my dreads and biting his way down my throat. “You can watch me, you can do anything you want with me.”

This time I kissed him. And it didn’t take much: a few more strokes and I was done, coming against my fingers and around his cock. It must have set him off, too, because his fingers tightened in my hair, almost painfully, and he threw a hand against the window as he cried out. I held him as he shuddered through it, and for a few moments we stayed like that, his body weight holding me up against the window.

Then he looked at me, grinned like a self-satisfied boy, and said, “That was awesome,” and I elbowed him.

“You completely planned that,” I said, and at his questioning glance, I added, “I know you didn’t just happen to have that condom with you.”

“How is preparation a bad thing? I just didn’t want to be, you know, in the moment and unprepared.”

“You dog,” I said.

“I can honestly say that’s the first time in my life anyone has called me that.” Carefully, he set me down, and I stood and stretched. Between the heels and the orgasms, I was still a little wobbly. “By the way, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for keeping those on.”

I laughed, and took them off while we did things like collecting the remnants of our clothes and disposing of the condom. My dress needed cleaning and I needed a shower, but both of those things could wait.

A little while later, when Eduardo was finally naked and we were settling into bed, I arranged myself alongside him and said, “You’re right, that was awesome.”

+||+||+

Singapore Air, though far and away the most luxurious airline I’d ever flown, was oddly lacking in wifi. But, I told myself, the company could get along without me until I checked in during my layover in Hong Kong, and in any case I mainly wanted it to email Gina and Eduardo. I could go ahead and write the messages now, though, and then send them during the layover.

Gina’s was first, shortest, and fairly insubstantial—she was picking me up from the airport, so I’d fill her in on everything as soon as I got there.

Eduardo’s was second, and not much longer, but I had more to say.

+||+||+

**To:** eduardo.saverin@gmail.com  
 **From:** orlain@gmail.com  
 **Subject:** Long haul  
 **Sent:** Monday, 9:52 p.m. (HKT)

8500 miles suck, Eduardo. Every single one of them. But I want to do it anyway. I don’t care if it’s expensive, logistically improbable, and potentially ethically questionable for us both. I want to do it, and I want it to work, and I love you.

***

  
 **To:** orlain@gmail.com  
 **From:** eduardo.saverin@gmail.com  
 **Subject:** Inveniemus viam aut faciemus.  
 **Sent:** Monday, 10:02 p.m. (SST)

We’ll make it work. I miss you already. I love you. — E

**Author's Note:**

> All the toys Orlain mentions are real: the chains made of [pearls](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/Pearl-Restraints/?initial=) or [semiprecious stones](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/Onyx-Restraints/?initial=), the [lace blindfold](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/Lace-Beaded-Blindfold/), [silk rope](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/Bondage-Rope/?initial=), and [gold handcuffs](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/24K-Handcuffs-with-Key-and-Chain/?initial=). She buys [these cuffs](http://www.kikidm.com/shop/My-Tie-Cuffs/?initial=PL7119_BLACK_ONE) for Eduardo, who does like pretty things. In the last scene, Orlain is wearing [these shoes](http://www.bergdorfgoodman.com/store/catalog/prod.jhtml?itemId=prod60780010&parentId=cat207102&masterId=cat203509&index=3&cmCat=cat000000cat200648cat203509cat207102), and if they don't make you want to immediately rob a bank to buy a pair for yourself, then I just don't know.


End file.
